On July 20 and July 23, 2025, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft looked back toward home and captured images of Earth and our Moon from about 290 million km (180 million miles) away. The spacecraft’s twin cameras captured multiple long-exposure pictures of the two bodies, which appear as dots sparkling with reflected sunlight amid a starfield in the constellation of Aries.
Psyche captured images of Earth and our Moon from about 290 million km (180 million miles) away in July 2025, as it calibrated its imager instrument. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU.
Psyche is a NASA mission to study a metal-rich asteroid with the same name, located in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
This is NASA’s first mission to study an asteroid that has more metal than rock or ice.
Psyche launched October 13, 2023, at 10:19 a.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center.
By August 2029, the spacecraft will begin exploring the asteroid that scientists think — because of its high metal content — may be the partial core of a planetesimal, a building block of an early planet.
“The Psyche multispectral imager instrument comprises a pair of identical cameras equipped with filters and telescopic lenses to photograph the asteroid Psyche’s surface in different wavelengths of light,” members of the mission’s science team said in a statement.
“The color and shape of a planetary body’s spectrum can reveal details about what it’s made of.”
“The Moon and the giant asteroid Vesta, for example, have similar kinds of ‘bumps and wiggles’ in their spectra that scientists could potentially also detect at Psyche.”
The scientists are interested in Psyche because it will help them better understand the formation of rocky planets with metallic cores, including Earth.
When choosing targets for the imager testing and calibration, they look for bodies that shine with reflected sunlight, just as the asteroid Psyche does.
They also look at objects that have a spectrum they’re familiar with, so they can compare previous telescopic or spacecraft data from those objects with what Psyche’s instruments observe.
Earlier this year, Psyche turned its lenses toward Jupiter and Mars for calibration — each has a spectrum more reddish than the bluer tones of Earth. That checkout also proved a success.
To determine whether the imager’s performance is changing, the researchers also compare data from the different tests.
That way, when the spacecraft slips into orbit around Psyche, they can be sure that the instrument behaves as expected.
“After this, we may look at Saturn or Vesta to help us continue to test the imagers,” said Dr. Jim Bell, the Psyche imager instrument lead at Arizona State University.
“We’re sort of collecting solar system ‘trading cards’ from these different bodies and running them through our calibration pipeline to make sure we’re getting the right answers.”
The imager wasn’t the only instrument that got a successful checkout in July 2025.
The mission team also put the spacecraft’s magnetometer and the gamma-ray and neutron spectrometer through a gamut of tests — something they do every six months.
“We are up and running, and everything is working well,” said Dr. Bob Mase, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“We’re on target to fly by Mars in May 2026, and we are accomplishing all of our planned activities for cruise.”
“That flyby is the spacecraft’s next big milestone, when it will use the Red Planet’s gravity as a slingshot to help the spacecraft get to the asteroid Psyche.”
“That will mark Psyche’s first of two planned loops around the Solar System and 1.6 billion km (1 billion miles) since launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in October 2023.”